Thursday, September 30, 2010

Careers for ISFJ Personality Types

Whether you're a young adult trying to find your place in the world, or a not-so-young adult trying to find out if you're moving along the right path, it's important to understand yourself and the personality traits which will impact your likeliness to succeed or fail at various careers. It's equally important to understand what is really important to you. When armed with an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and an awareness of what you truly value, you are in an excellent position to pick a career which you will find rewarding.

ISFJs generally have the following traits:

Large, rich inner store of information which they gather about people

Highly observant and aware of people's feelings and reactions

Excellent memory for details which are important to them

Very in-tune with their surroundings - excellent sense of space and function

Can be depended on to follow things through to completion

Will work long and hard to see that jobs get done

Stable, practical, down-to-earth - they dislike working with theory and abstract thought

Dislike doing things which don't make sense to them

Value security, tradition, and peaceful living

Service-oriented: focused on what people need and want

Kind and considerate

Likely to put others' needs above their own

Learn best with hands-on training

Enjoy creating structure and order

Take their responsibilities seriously

Extremely uncomfortable with conflict and confrontation

ISFJs have two basic traits which help define their best career direction: 1) they are extremely interested and in-tune with how other people are feeling, and 2) they enjoy creating structure and order, and are extremely good at it. Ideally, the ISFJ will choose a career in which they can use their exceptional people-observation skills to determine what people want or need, and then use their excellent organizational abilities to create a structured plan or environment for achieving what people want. Their excellent sense of space and function combined with their awareness of aesthetic quality also gives them quite special abilities in the more practical artistic endeavors, such as interior decorating and clothes design.

The following list of professions is built on our impressions of careers which would be especially suitable for an ISFJ. It is meant to be a starting place, rather than an exhaustive list. There are no guarantees that any or all of the careers listed here would be appropriate for you, or that your best career match is among those listed.